7 key principles to connect with the hearing world, again

Last week I wrote a piece on what all we really want, as human beings, and how hearing loss takes away the ability to connect with others.

Once you’re armed with your hearing aids, your journey isn’t over. And it could be a tough one, if you don’t know where to start.

To help you get you started, here are 7 key principles that have helped me in my journey with hearing loss, and have also helped my students:

Find the courage to ask for help. The first time you tell anyone you have hearing loss, your heart beats so fast that all you wanna do is run away. But if you stick to the plan you’ll feel great after. And you’ll find out that the world will still stand…

Learn how to educate others effectively. Hearing people don’t know how to speak to us and it is our job to first understand what we need and then to teach it to others, tirelessly.

Find the best audiologist and the best fitting you can get. It’s frustrating to take time off-work to visit our audiologist and it’s tempting to just settle with a poor fitting or hearing aids that just don’t do the job. But if you invest time in finding the best audiology you can find, you’ll ripe the benefits for a long time.

Learn about the assistive technology that can help you. There’s tons of technology out there. A lot of it is expensive, that’s true. But some of it is worth it and you could trial most of it via your audiologist.

Journal. Take the time to write on your diary about the situations that make you stressed. You can read an example of my journaling here. Usually when I journal about a problem, the solution comes to me quicker than I expect.

Experiment. Once you come up with ideas at step 5, you have to go out and experiment. This can be as simple as trying a script with your manager at work or ask your yoga teacher if she can wear your remote mic.

Do this all with a group. Dealing with hearing loss is less lonely, more fun and inspiring when you’re going through it all with a group!

The main thing you’ll notice when you start following these principles is that you’ll take more responsibility for your happiness.

This is important, because when you take responsibility, you complain less and do more. The more you do the happier you get.

It’s a spiral upwards.

If you can’t hear at the movies beacuse there’s no captions, you could blame the cinema, or your friends who “dragged you out” and forced you to have a poor experience.

Or you could blame yourself because you didn’t check with the theatre if they had captions or could make adjustments for you.

Guess which approach makes things better?

PS: this piece went out of my Friday newsletter. If you’d like to receive my next thoughts, click on this link to join.